So what are Julie and I up to this week? Well, in addition to recording episodes on personhood, milk and mermaids, we also published two exciting episodes that should expand your mind on the topics of human creativity, machine intelligence and the processing power of the human infant. So here are the breakdowns as well as the embedded feeds for each episode.

The plastics manufacturer had used its manual take out system for its entire history for nearly 20 years. This manual system had several pitfalls including a large amount of scrap, which in turn meant money down the drain in throwaway products. The manual system also lacked reliability and increased chances for injuries. The company brought technology into its facility to help increase the production of quality products while making the plant safer for its employees. The company also hoped to increase its sales by improving the manufacturing process efficiencies through automation. Prior to automation, the company had to turn away opportunities to increase its business due to capacity limitations.
The plastics manufacturer also considered a vendor with a fixed automation system that included a simple slide but decided that system wasnâ€™t reliable enough for its needs. In addition, every time the mold tooling changed, the slide also had to be changed to accommodate the new product. This created a higher cost to change tooling that was not acceptable. The facility included one machine with a manufacturers fixed automation system, but they wanted to find a more flexible and reliable solution.